Joe Celko's Trees in SQL; amars, obi, jbucata     I've personally implemented a flavor of the nested set representation and it is indeed very fast on queries for subsets and parents (the supervisors problem discussed in the other article)-- but starts to get very very slow on inserts, and especially with PostgreSQL, transaction loads start to get very large with all of the shifting of the number line as you insert into the tree. Now the pointer to the other article that includes the materialized path representation is something else to consider. I'm going to look at that regarding some of my own hierarchical libraries (which I haven't been using very often recently because of other work-demands.)

Regular Expressions     Together with XSLT, is going to create something very special for me and hopefully for everyone else as well-- something somewhat related to Alvin Toffler's Third Wave. I need to win the lottery so I can do this more "interesting" work without losing my house. Let's say for the moment, that we are not making our computers do enough of the work in the information economy and they absolutely don't have to get it 100% right all the time with semantic understanding as long as you can weight what the computer does with some kind of confidence rating. A lot of what heuristic anti-spam software does is creating technology that could be better used elsewhere. What's the best heuristic anti-spam software out there if it is not SpamAssassin? I don't think that SpamAssassin is the best antispam tool available because of how it trys to kill the spam-- I think Tagged Message Delivery Agent has the best solution-- but I do think that there is some very interesting alternative applications for the same technology.

Meetup: ww.meetup.com     What a cool site. Out of curiosity I followed a link that mentioned the "Slashdot Meetup." I haven't searched for any other meetups other than Python and Advogato and there were some meetups for Python. Advogato seems like a community that could have use for meetups. The best thing about meetups is perhaps, the thought that we don't have to have a Linux World, or PyCon, or CodeCon to bring great people together.

SyncML     Downloaded all the PDFs. I'm a glutton for reading-punishment. I've got a stack of books checked out from the library and dozens of PDF's saved for future reference.

Libraries     Don't neglect your library-- just because you can clickypointy Amazon doesn't mean that you couldn't just get it for free from the library. One of the books that I checked out that's on my "list" to read is Bitter Java and I'm already halfway through Technomanifestos.